Teacher dismissed for seeking time off for cancer treatment can sue school

Kristen Biel, a fifth-grade Catholic school teacher in California, was fired after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and needed time off for chemotherapy. A federal judge dismissed her discrimination suit, saying Biel, whose everyday curriculum included religious instruction, was effectively a minister who was constitutionally barred from suing the church.

On Monday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco reinstated Biel’s suit and said teaching religion, among other subjects, in a religious school doesn’t necessarily make someone a minister.

The Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom allows religious organizations to choose leaders and representatives of their faith, “but it does not provide carte blanche to disregard antidiscrimination laws when it comes to other employees who do not serve a leadership role in the faith,” the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 2-1 ruling.

Biel worked as a public and private schoolteacher and a tutor for four years before St. James Catholic School in Torrance (Los Angeles County) hired her in 2013 as a substitute teacher. The school promoted her to the full-time job several months later, and the principal gave her a positive evaluation in November 2013, saying she had done a “very good” job in promoting a safe and caring learning environment.

After her breast cancer diagnosis less than six months later, Biel told the school she would need time off for surgery and chemotherapy. A few weeks later, the principal, Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, told Biel she would not be rehired for the following academic year. Kreuper said Biel’s “classroom management” was “not strict” and added that it was “not fair ... to have two teachers for the children during the school year.”

Kreuper retired this year. Last week, school officials accused Kreuper and another nun at St. James, Sister Lana Chang, of embezzling $500,000 from the school and using the money for travel and casino gambling.

Biel’s suit claimed the school violated the federal ban on job discrimination against the disabled. In response, St. James invoked the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling that exempted another religious school from the same law for firing an ailing teacher. In a unanimous decision, the high court said the Lutheran Church could classify the teacher as a religious employee, noting that she led her students in prayers, was given a minister’s title and extra job protections by her school, and claimed a minister’s tax exemption with the government.

She taught religion a half hour each day, four days a week, using the school’s workbook on Catholicism, and used religious themes and symbols in her overall curriculum as the school required, Judge Michelle Friedland said in the majority opinion. She said Biel, who is Catholic, joined her students in twice-daily prayers but did not lead them, and also attended a monthly mass at the school, where her job was to keep her class quiet and orderly.

There was no evidence that Biel considered herself a minister, the school did not describe her as one, and her year-to-year job offered no special ministerial protections or benefits, Friedland said.

The opinion was joined by D. Michael Fisher, a federal appeals court judge from Washington, D.C., temporarily assigned to the Ninth Circuit. Judge Raymond Fisher dissented, saying that Biel’s job expressly required her to “propagate and manifest the Catholic faith in all aspects of the role” and that the church was entitled to consider her a religious employee.

Biel’s lawyer, Andrew Pletcher, said Biel is still struggling with cancer but is delighted by the ruling.

“We needed a case to define the outer edges” of classifying religious-school employees as ministers, Pletcher said, and this is the first one to do so.

Bob Egelko has been a reporter since June 1970. He spent 30 years with the Associated Press, covering news, politics and occasionally sports in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, and legal affairs in San Francisco from 1984 onward. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner for five months in 2000, then joined The Chronicle in November 2000.

His beat includes state and federal courts in California, the Supreme Court and the State Bar. He has a law degree from McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and is a member of the bar. Coverage has included the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the appointment of Rose Bird to the state Supreme Court and her removal by the voters, the death penalty in California and the battles over gay rights and same-sex marriage.